What is Google Crawling and Indexing?

Two-Steps to Ensure Google knows your Website

Google Search gives convenient answers and information to its users is through a specific process. This SEO process is called Indexing. It allows Google to understand the content, relevancy, and importance of any page within a website. I consider the management of this to be the most critical practice in SEO. You can follow every other best SEO practice, but if Google isn’t crawling your website, your website will never show on search results pages. It is crucial to ensure that your website is being crawled, indexed, and rendered as you make updates to your site. Understanding what crawling, indexing, and rendering are is paramount to completing the indexation process because it allows you to understand how important and effective it can be for your traffic and ranking of your webpages. Below is the two-step indexation process to ensure that your website pages are seen, understood, and ranked by Google search.

1) Crawling

A web crawler, or what those in the SEO world call spiders or bots, is an automated program that follows Google’s algorithm to examine the content and structure of pages. Google wants you to include the following information for it to easier understand your content; title tags, meta descriptions, headings, content, and more. The reason for this is so that the bots can interpret the content, categories, and products within a page. There are different strategies that can be placed within the code to make sure that the bots are able to crawl a page in the most effectively and efficiently.

• Create a sitemap – holds a complete list of a website’s pages and primarily lets bots know what to crawl
• Add Schema – a “roadmap” for the bots to crawl a page productively
• Disallow content within the Robots.txt file that isn’t necessary to search
• Site speed – if a page loads too slow the robot will leave before it can crawl the full page

2) Indexing

Google search index is a database that stores billions of web pages.  Google search index organizes the content within the web that has been crawled, it can be easier described as a library for Google. When a user types in a query, Google searches the index to find the most relevant and applicable pages for the user. When crawlers find a web page they render the content. The webpages are then indexed into Google searches database. Below are a few ways to ensure that your pages are getting indexed

• Submitting sitemap to Google Search Console – a way to help search engines perceive your website
• Submitting pages for indexing to Google Search Console – tells Google you have updated content. Google likes updated content
• Create a blog – websites with blogs get indexed more

Google wants to give the most relevant and convenient answers to users search queries. With this process in place, it makes it easier for Google to do just that. Crawling and indexing can help exponentially with Organic search. If your webpages have SEO best practices implemented, it is crucial to ensure that they are being crawled and indexed effectively and efficiently. That way you can show up within searches that are relative to the user’s intent. Try these two easy steps and watch your traffic and page rankings increase. For more questions regarding crawling and indexing contact Ecreative today! Written by Kelly Bergeron, Digital Marketing Specialist at Ecreative